


An Actual Meal, For Once

by ViceroyOfMonteCristo



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Food, Light alcohol usage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 14:49:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11359674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViceroyOfMonteCristo/pseuds/ViceroyOfMonteCristo
Summary: A week into their 3-year journey across the Yellow Yard, John realizes that Jade hasn't really eaten much fresh food given how she's lived alone on an island all her life, and decides to take matters into his own hands.





	An Actual Meal, For Once

“Jade, are you _serious_?” John had been with Jade on the ship for what he could only estimate had been about a week or so, and they'd simply spent that time trying to catch up on what had happened during the game, since the hectic nature of their mission had left them with little-to-no time to actually just _talk_. The topics of their conversations had slowly drifted around, from their hobbies, musical inclinations, and basically anything they could find in common with each other, when their dialogue had drifted toward food. “You've _never_ had any food that's, like, fresh? Have you ever even cooked _anything_ on your own?”

“No, silly! Who would've taught me that? Bec?” Jade felt like John was kinda taking his bond with his father for granted. She hadn't had the kind of social interactions that come naturally with, well, any form of face-to-face connection with another human being, something that up until a couple days ago she hadn't had since her grandfather's untimely demise at (technically) her hands. “I mean, I had my greenhouse, and I had some fruits and veggies from it! But, like, in terms of actual meals... I guess not!”

John looked judgingly at the girl in front of her, wondering how she managed to stay healthy on that island of hers for 13 years. He realized that, if this trip was really going to take three years, he'd obviously be spending his fair share of time in the kitchen. Sure, they had the devices that came with Sburb at their disposal, but unfortunately the alchemy system was a bit finicky to work with, and even doing something as simple as trying to alchemize individual ingredients was a serious chore, one that John didn't feel he was capable of undertaking with his limited amount of coding experience.

Thankfully, despite the hideously massive pile of cake mix boxes in his house's pantry, it was still pretty well stocked with common ingredients, meaning he could create more of any of them fairly easily using the Alchemiter. And he figured those fancy food devices that Jade's grandpa gave her might have a couple other convenient foodstuffs in them, so it'd be a good idea to have her around on occasion, in case she could help out.

“You know what, Jade? I bet you've never really had any good food before. Whatever the hell your dinky little refrigerator cube could pump out is probably nothing compared to what I could do in the kitchen.”

Jade's ears shifted back a bit as she put on her best overly-dramatic pouty face, obviously a tad hurt by the fact that John just told her she'd really hadn't eaten “real food” in her life. “Oh yeah, Egbert? Why don't you show me how to make this so-called 'food' of yours!”

It was at this point that John ironically realized just how much he'd relied on alchemized food for the entire duration of the session. Outside of the one time that Nannasprite had cooked him an actual meal back on LOWAS, he hadn't actually done any _real_ cooking since before this whole Sburb mess started. He really hoped he wasn't overblowing his own capabilities on this one. Regardless, he couldn't step down from this challenge that Harley had issued him. “Alright, you're on! But of course, I can't do this alone, can I? Could I count on a bit of... sous chef-ery from you, madam?”

Jade sighed and rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. “I _gueeesssss_ so... I mean, you're the one who said I didn't have any experience with food, so you gotta teach me the ropes here, don't you?” She smirked at him, expecting him to give some kind of witty retort about being her new “culinary mentor”. But to her surprise, he didn't necessarily seem all that smug about it. He simply put on one of his trademark doofy grins and said, “I'm sure we'll both learn a bit from this!”

They both agreed to meet at where the planets were being stored on the ship in about an hour... or, at least, what seemed like one in the strange state their travels had left them. John was the first to arrive, having changed from his God Tier outfit back into a t-shirt and shorts. He'd told Jade to change into something she didn't necessarily mind getting somewhat dirty; he still didn't exactly know what he wanted to do in terms of dinner, as he hadn't gotten the chance to stake out his resources before getting the rather sudden challenge from her. About 5 minutes later she showed up, her lengthy black Witch robe now replaced with a long-sleeved shirt with her signature blue atom emblazoned on the front, along with what could only be described as a “utility skirt”. He couldn't tell if the smile on her face was from excitement, anticipation, or a strange mixture of the two, but it seemed a bit bigger than the one she normally wore. He made a mental note to remind her over dinner about how adorable she looked; hopefully he wouldn't lose that thought during whatever shenanigans were about to ensue in his kitchen.

Jade took the liberty of shrinking both of them down and plopping them onto LOWAS, right outside the front door of John's house. Despite still being quite unused to the feeling of having all your body parts simultaneously resized, John managed to regain his wits quickly enough to hop forward and open the door, offering a hasty “After you!”, in an attempt to show her that he did, in fact, have standard human manners. “Ooh, such a _charmer_... You sure know how to treat a lady!” Jade retorted, offering a slight giggle while softly bounding up the front steps into the living room. The boy blushed slightly, following her in and shutting the door behind him.

 _OH FUCK, I FORGOT TO CLEAN UP_ was the only thing running through John's mind as he stared at the complete mess sprawled before him. The various imps had trashed his entire house during his time in the medium, and he'd meant to fix the place up when he got the chance, but he'd been spending so much time with Jade that he totally neglected to do so. Disconcerting inksplotches marred so many pieces of furniture and architecture that he could've sworn Rose had broken in and turned his entire house into a giant Rorschach Test, just to see if she could unlock some of his subconscious feelings about his father. He desperately hoped the kitchen was at least in a slightly less destroyed state.

Thankfully for both of them, it seemed that Nannasprite had taken to fixing up the kitchen when she did some baking. All the fixtures were conveniently still powered, in whatever magical way Sburb provided electricity to sockets that had long since been severed from the grid. Unfortunately, the game didn't have the same magical perpetuating effects on some of the more perishable items in the fridge, though John had long ago learned that he could revert food back from a rotten state by alchemizing it with a clock.

“Well,” he said excitedly, “here we are! I guess we should get the show on the road now. Is there, um, anything you exactly had in mind that you wanted?” John really hoped the little Refrigerizerolator or whatever the hell thing it was that had been feeding Jade her entire life didn't have the ability to spit out filet mignons on command, otherwise he'd be having a damn hard time pleasing her tastes.

“Not really, no... I mean, if you're so obsessed with getting me to eat some of your “normal human food”, I guess I'd only be going on what you, Dave, or Rose had talked about... and I never really bothered to talk to any of you about it!” Now that she'd mentioned it, Jade realized just how little each of them had talked about just general, mundane life stuff. Getting to spend the last few days with John really showed her how detached she was from society. “I guess we should just check to see what we have to work with for now.”

The fridge had all the standard staples. John rushed all the expired stuff, like milk, eggs, and bread, up to the alchemizer and refreshed them, while Jade rooted around in the freezer, wondering how the heck the ice maker (and along with it, the sink and dishwasher) was still getting water. At this point, neither of them still really knew what they could do with any of the strange, generic jumble of groceries they had at hand. John absentmindedly started opening cupboards trying to find any dry stuff or spices they could use, before stumbling across a small pile of boxes full of pasta in the pantry. _Well_ , he figured, _guess I could put this to use somehow. I mean, pasta is a romantic kinda thing, right?_ He grabbed part of the spaghetti cache and placed it on the counter. “Alright... I think I've got an idea. You ever had pasta before?”

Jade picked up one of the packages set out in front of her. “I mean, I know what it is, but I don't really think I've gotten the chance to eat it before. It looks pretty easy to make, I suppose. I think we can handle this.” Harley flipped the box over and looked at the instructions on the back, before inquiring with Egbert as to where the pots were. Meanwhile, John headed back up to the alchemizer to get some new tomatoes for the sauce. When he returned to the kitchen, he found the girl waiting for the water to heat up on the stove. She shuffled around a couple of the boxes, trying desperately to figure out the finer differences between the weird pasta names. “Spaghetti, angel hair, spaghettini, bu... bu-bucatini... linguini... taglia- what the hell are all of these? They all look nearly the same!” John shrugged and pulled out a cutting board for the tomatoes, before checking in the freezer and conveniently finding some frozen cheese raviolis in the back, behind the ice cream sandwiches. “To be honest? I don't really think there is a difference. I'll bet it's all just the same thing and they brand it differently to make more money.”

Jade giggled and turned back to the now-boiling water. “What, you think there's some kinda big _pasta conspiracy_ here?” She gestured to the pile of boxes. “So, what all do you want me to throw in here? We've certainly got quite a collection of _exactly the same pasta_ here.” Some mental math had to go into figuring out what needed to be added to the water in what order, since some of them needed to boil for different durations, but the two of them managed to get it figured out, and soon enough everything was cooking along happily.

John returned to his diligent work on the tomatoes, cubing them and throwing them into a small pan and bringing them to a simmer with some water and a little bit of cream. Lamenting his house's lack of fresh herbs, he solemnly grabbed some shakers full of dried basil and parsley from the cupboard and shook them into the pan, before looking into the fridge and grabbing some butter to melt into the sauce.

If there was one thing Jade Harley had noticed after becoming part dog, it was this: she'd definitely acquired one hell of an amazing sense of smell. And whatever it was that her co-chef was doing over there... _GOD DAMN_ did it smell good; good enough to where she just stood there staring off into space for a couple seconds, seemingly lost in her sensory trance. The only thing that managed to bring her out of her daze was the sudden beeping of the kitchen timer signifying all the pasta needed to be fished out of the pot. She dumped it all into a colander and dropped the pot into the sink, before returning to John and deeply and enthusiastically inhaling just to make sure he knew she was totally interested in what he was keeping himself busy with.

“Okay, at this point I gotta admit it,” she exclaimed, “You really seem to know what you're doing. Are you sure you didn't ask for my 'help' just to show off?” A slight blush crossed over John's face as he turned to her and gave her a quick smooch on the cheek. “Heheh... alright. You _maaaayyyy_ be on to something there... but seriously, I really did want your help! You know, cooking is an art, and art's meant to be shared.” As much as Jade appreciated his somewhat futile attempt to be poetic, she couldn't help but give him a slight smirk as she looked down again at the red and green mixture now bubbling in the pan. She'd had her fair share of tomatoes back in her garden, but never really given them much thought as being an ingredient in anything larger... she'd always just eaten them like she would eat an apple (as messy as it was). Still, she had to admit, as strangely discomforting as that strange red liquid in front of her looked, she was hungry enough at this point to overlook it. “Uh... John, how much longer do you think this is gonna take? I'm actually really looking forward to eating.” John turned back to the stove and did a mental once-over to make sure he hadn't forgotten to add anything to the pan. “I... I think it's almost ready! Here, lemme pull this off the heat and we'll see if we can find anything else that might go with it.”

As John shuffled around in the pantry looking for literally anything else that he deemed “sufficiently Italian”, he left Jade with the duty of finding something to drink. Unfortunately for her, the trip she made to the fridge was a relatively uneventful one, finding that the only liquids of interest in there were a gallon of milk and one of those little bottles of lemon juice shaped like the fruit. Considering her options, Jade had one idea running in the back of her head that she was kind of hesitant to bring up... but at this point she felt like she had no other real options. “Hey John?” “Yeah?” “Do you know... if you have any wine around here?”

He was a bit surprised by the question, not because he hadn't really tried alcohol before (he'd had a little champagne on New Year's a couple times but never a full glass), but just because he had literally no idea where the hell it would be in his house. “Uhhhhhh... maybe?? Hang on, lemme pull this stuff off the heat.” He shut off the stove, pulled the pot of sauce off the burner, and let it slowly come to rest. “While that cools down a bit, would you mind helping me look?”

Their first attempts were searching around the kitchen, to no avail; the same results followed in the ruins of his Dad's office and the living room. John was about to head upstairs when he heard Jade shout at him from the utility room behind the kitchen. He hurried back over to see her standing in front of a small cabinet, concealing a hidden wine fridge with a few bottles inside. “I'm honestly surprised you never found this...” she playfully scoffed at him. “I mean, it's not like I was looking for it!” John replied. (He actually had been looking for it since he was like 11. It was hideously embarrassing to him that he'd never looked there, but he did his best to hide his shame.) They looked through the dozen or so bottles in the minifridge and agreed on a relatively tame looking bottle of red, given how John had heard of it going best with pasta in movies. And hey, when had movies ever provided him with an unrealistic representation of life?

Jade delicately carried the glass bottle outside to the front yard, where John had set up a little table and two chairs for the them. Up until now, he'd never realized just how perfect his planet was for an occasion like this; just the two of them, sitting down to what was pretty much her first actual meal in years under the dark clouds, punctuated occasionally by a star-like firefly illuminating the gloom, the rest of the planet far beneath them and their altitude giving them a comfortable breeze on occasion. If he didn't know it any better, he'd have said the entire land was designed specifically for a date night. As he stared off into the distance, Jade sidled up to him and wrapped her arm around his neck, resting her head on his shoulder. “I never really got the chance to see this place, John... it's really beautiful! I wish mine was this temperate, but the snow is nice in its own right.” John wrapped his arm around her waist and rested his head on hers, feeling the breeze run past them. “Yeah, I was in so much of a rush during the game that I never really stopped to realize how incredible this place looked. It certainly helps that there's a girl next to me right now that looks even more incredible.” Jade playfully shoved him away from her. “Ooooooh, you're such a charmer. Wipe that smirk off your face loverboy, we've still got some work to do.”

The two headed back into the kitchen, where they plated up their food and grabbed two wine glasses for themselves before heading back out into the yard. John, being the ultimate gentleman he was, just barely remembered that it's good manners to pull out seats for girls right when Jade had already sat down, but she didn't particularly mind. (Plus she thought it was cute to see him flustered.) He had managed to find a corkscrew in one of the utensil drawers, so he did his best to unseal the wine bottle with... minimal cork fragments falling into the liquid. Likewise, the amount he spilled while trying to fill their glasses showed he was no sommelier. Eventually though, he finished up and sat down himself. John sat and waited, watching Jade as she took her first bite of the pasta, her face near immediately lighting up. “Oh my god... this tastes amazing! I just... wow. I had no idea what I was missing all these years!” John blushed and twirled some around his fork. “I'm really glad you like it Jade! I'm sure we could try this again sometime, we've got more than enough foods to try!” His own impressions of the pasta were pretty much the same as Jade's: it was pretty damn good stuff, given how little he knew about actually making pasta sauce.

Both of them agreed to try their wine at the same time, just cause neither of them were particularly looking forward to what the taste could be. After their first sip, Jade scrunched her face up at the acrid taste of the alcohol, with John taking on a look of half disgust and half bewilderment. They weren't particularly fond of the taste, but it wasn't all that bad. Not like they had anything else to drink, beside water. But as the night went on, they could tell they were getting more comfortable with it; not to mention more comfortable talking to each other. Time passed and their conversation lingered, slowly flowing from one topic to the next, the two of them mutually enjoying the evening with each other, each of them starting to realize just how well their bubbly personalities complimented one another.

. . . 

The bottle was about half empty when Jade asked John if he'd ever watched _Lady and the Tramp_ , grabbing a single strand of spaghetti and putting and end in her mouth. He was suddenly very glad for his interest in movies.

. . .

The bottle was completely empty. They'd drained it surprisingly quickly for both of them, especially given how hesitant they were to drink it at first. Both of them, fairly tipsy at this point, had finished their pasta about half an hour ago and at this point were laying on the grass, staring up at the night sky. Jade was resting her head on John's stomach, letting him run his hands through her hair and occasionally scratching behind her ears.

They could slowly feel themselves approaching sleep, so John lifted Jade's head off him and carried her up to his bedroom. He gently crawled into bed, placing her down next to him. She turned toward him and groggily murmured “John?” He did his best to meet her half-lidded eyes. “Yeah Jade?” She wrapped her arms around him, pulling his face toward hers and did her best to meet his lips with hers, kissing him as deeply as she could at her current level of inebriation. After about 10 seconds, she withdrew her lips and whispered “I love you John. I had an amazing night, and I hope we can do this again soon.” He blushed (even more than he already was given his tipsiness) and replied “I love you too Jade. If you want, we could do this every week or so...” He never got a response though; Jade had already fallen fast asleep. He shrugged and slowly curled his arms around her, closing the gap between them and enjoying how warm she made him feel. The time he'd spent on the ship with Jade made him realize just how much he cared for her, and over the course of the night she'd made it pretty clear she felt the same way; he guess she just needed a little bit more courage to admit it, which was something the wine was willing to provide. His only hope now was that they would be able to talk to each other the next day about it and still have the same feelings... after they'd nursed their inevitable hangovers. John went back to running his hand through her long hair, focusing on the rhythm of her breathing as he quickly drifted off to sleep, already looking forward to what would happen in the coming days.

 


End file.
